Social Media Position in Workplace Communication - Knowledge Management and Leadership Styles Effective as well as efficient communication in workplace environment is a critical factor for sustainable existence and growth of firms. There are many empirical pieces of evidence that expected performance is highly dependent on the right value creation and such process needs proper knowledge sharing throughout the firm. It is the top management task to build the right communication infrastructure within (and outside) the firm to capture, diffuse and apply knowledge essential for creating the value. Since communication can be reckoned as one of the crucial competences of managers, formation of proper functioning communication infrastructure should be based on good knowledge of the individual communication tools characteristics and other relevant and influencing elements. Besides of this knowledge there is also
concrete top management leadership style that has tight connection with the style and form of communication and the preference of more or less open communication tools and channels. The use of social media among the other workplace communication tools and channels brings many benefits especially for enabling and promoting social interactions; nevertheless there are some barriers as well to utilize the full potential of social media. This paper investigates expected
relations among three groups of variables, specifically various communication tools used by managers toward the employees, various leadership styles and chosen knowledge management measures applying empirical quantitative survey to ascertain the general proposition put forth in the research. This proposition assumes: 1. positive association between the
openness of leadership styles and the rate of social media utilization in workplace communication; 2. positive association between openness of leadership styles and quality of knowledge management and finally 3. positive association between quality of knowledge management and the rate of social media utilization in workplace communication. While the paper has
character of work-in-progress paper, only less sophisticated statistics was applied for analysis of data obtained from survey. Survey was realized during the autumn 2014 among 450 Czech firms and questions in the structured questionnaire that were analysed have character of a seven-point scale. Control variables used for the analysis were the size of a firm given by the
number of employees and recoded into four-point scale, certain industry and the variable showing the innovativeness of management measured again on a seven-point scale were included in the analysis. The preliminary findings can add new piece of knowledge and as such they have both theoretical and managerial implications. They incorporate the leadership
styles perspective into the workplace communication and especially into the social media communication literature as well as into the knowledge management theory. The findings also stress the role of leadership style in communication for the purpose of knowledge management in the practice of firms